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Facebook To Shut Down \'Trending\' News Section In Favor Of Breaking News Test

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"We will remove Trending from Facebook next week and we will also remove products and third-party partner integrations that rely on the Trends API," Alex Hardiman, Facebook's Head of News Products said in a statement on Friday.

Facebook introduced the Trending feature in 2014 aiming to help people discover news topics that were popular across the community.

But for this feature that show a collection of headlines, the social networking giant soon faced allegations of political bias.

The headlines were initially selected by human editors and a former contractor on the project claimed that Facebook used this feature to promote liberal causes and suppress conservative issues, NBC News reported.

Facebook later removed the human editors and in its bid to appear neutral put in place an algorithm to decide what would find a place in the Trending section.

However, the algorithm went haywire, at times promoting hoax stories and offensive headlines, including one about a man masturbating with a McDonald's sandwich, the NBC News report said.

Facebook said that the feature was only available in five countries and accounted for less than 1.5 per cent of clicks to news publishers on average.

"From research we found that over time people found the product to be less and less useful," Hardiman said.

"We're exploring new ways to help people stay informed about timely, breaking news that matters to them, while making sure the news they see on Facebook is from trustworthy and quality sources," she said.

Facebook said it is running a test in several countries including in India to let publishers put a "breaking news" indicator on their posts in News Feed.